As BP promised, the walruses are fine: Stephanie Grace

When BPGlobalPR, a popular parody of BP's official Twitter feed, asked readers last week to "cut us some slack" because "we've kinda just been winging this whole 'deepwater drilling' thing," it was, quite obviously, a joke.

BP PLC/The Associated PressThis image from video provided by BP early Saturday shows oil pouring out of the well head around the capping device in the Gulf of Mexico. June 5, 2010

Yet a new analysis of BP's emergency plans, rubberstamped by the equally asleep-at-the-wheel federal Minerals Management Service, suggests the fake company line is actually a pretty accurate summation of the real company's response to the oil well that's still gushing a mile under the Gulf of Mexico.

The Associated Press took a good close look at two disaster response plans that cover the Deepwater Horizon site, a 582-page regional spill plan and a shorter document addressing the individual site, and concluded that they were riddled with mistakes and erroneous assumptions.

Among the individual errors: Marine life specialists' phone numbers are wrong. An Internet link to a cleanup equipment supplier is broken. One national wildlife expert listed as a possible source of information actually died in 2005, four years before the document was filed.

And "sensitive biological resources" listed as in a potential spill's path include cold-climate marine mammals like walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals, none of which inhabit the warm-water Gulf of Mexico. Kind of makes you wonder whether that passage was lifted from a document covering some place like Alaska, where all those animals actually do live.

In a broader sense, the assessments paint a rosy picture of the likely outcome of what the company describes as an unlikely spill.

BP said there would be just a 21 percent chance that oil would reach Louisiana's coast within a month; in fact the first sheen hit the state in nine days after the rig exploded. The company also said it had more than enough equipment in place to capture any oil before it would hit shore.

If the documents downplay risk to the Gulf coast, they completely ignore the threat beyond. There's no mention of the much-discussed loop current, for example, which could send oil around the Florida peninsula and up the Atlantic Coast.

The 52-page plan BP submitted early last year covering Mississippi Canyon Block 252, the location of the busted well, is particularly disheartening to read in hindsight, after seeing all those pictures of oiled birds and turtles and gunky wetlands and beaches.

Out in the Gulf, a spill might cause "some detrimental effects" on fish habitats, the report concedes, but it would likely be "sub-lethal." Both finfish and shellfish, the company pointed out, can swim away.

Potential onshore damage is described just as dismissively.

"An accidental oil spill from the proposed activities could cause impacts to beaches. However, due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected," the report says.

"Both the historical spill data and the combined trajectory/risk calculations ... indicated there is little risk of contact or impact to the coastline and associated environmental resources."

The document goes on to use the same wording to describe potential risk to wetlands, to shore birds and coastal nesting birds, to coastal wildlife refuges, and to coastal wilderness areas.

As with the misplaced sea mammals, you've got to wonder whether the author either used boilerplate language, or just blocked and copied. It's as if the goal was just to fill in all the lines and check off all the boxes, not to position the company to deal with an actual, rather than theoretical, crisis.

"The AP report paints a picture of a company that was making it up as it went along, while telling regulators it had the full capability to deal with a major spill," Nelson wrote in an e-mail. "We know that wasn't true."

Yes, we do know that, now. What we don't know is whether to laugh about it, or to cry.

Stephanie Grace is a staff columnist. She can be reached at sgrace@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3383.